Before I begin to officially share the experiences of the team from the past ten months, at a personal level, it doesn’t feel right to term anything we do as “charity” or “benevolent” deeds when we are accounting them publicly! Nevertheless, considering this only as a place where we share our experiences with a hope to conjure up a sense of Samvedana (empathy) and not as a place where we glorify our minisculer contributions, I proceed forward.

                It has been a while that Samvedana updated itself to the outside world. “What is up with Sam these days?” we were very frequently asked. So let me very simply brief on what happened from the past 2 months.

•     We have been trying to involve as many individuals as we can into this and spread about Sam.
•     Last academic year, we have joined 3 kids into a private school and have been trying to motivate many others to be regular to the government school that they are attending.

The second task though was very easily summarized , took a lot of time, energy and persistent effort by our tireless team members. I intend to be their voice and narrate their experiences to all of you.

How it all started?

                In the month of April,2009, we were thinking real hard of taking up some activity which has to be supported by Sam regularly and fit the entire micro donations idea of ours which is the very heart of Samvedana. We were absolutely clueless as to where to start and felt like a small lost fish in a seamless evasive and completely unfamiliar ocean. Each of the team member took the responsibility of coming up with some ideas for projects. Then we thought  “when we want to do something good, why don’t we just start it right here instead of being clueless and looking all over the place”. We then decided on focusing on issues which are in our closer proximity to our campus.

              There is a belt of homes of people on daily wages about half a kilometer from our college. Many of our college students (including us) move past them on our way to Dominoes or Subway yapping with friends and it is unfortunate that though they live in the eyes of the whole world, very few have ever cast their glance or have lent them a helping hand. We planned on talking to the people living there and listing out the problems faced by them. We did our first survey during the second week of April where we got complete details

              After the survey which was done early in the morning for about 2 hours by Dharmeet, Prateek, Rohit and Kranthi, Bharat and many others we understood that

• Not all kids are going to school because the nearest known government school is about 4-5 kilometers away from their home.
• Their knowledge about health and sanitation and cleanliness is minimal.
• Most of the parents are ignorant about the importance of the above two
• The male members of almost every family consume alcohol.

             Though all the above issues seem quite platitudinal, we were trying to fit ourselves in initially solving at least few of the above issues, our long term aim being addressing each of these issues permanently. We decided on taking up the issue of kids’ education.

              Few of the kids are very bright and given the much necessary support both economically and psychologically, they would be able to reach greater heights. All those kids go to a government school which is about 4-5 kilometers from their home walking in the scorching heat. Few young kids who cannot go that far walking past the maddening traffic have joined a school run by highly enthusiastic lady by name Lakshmi in a hut near their homes.

        A second, more focused survey for gathering information about kids was done in the first week of June for three consecutive days by a team of 7 members - Kranthi, Dharmeet, Rohit, Bharat Ram, Gopal, Srinivas Vundavalli and Bapineedu  have taken up the tiring job of talking to each and every kid and their respective parents.

Procedure followed by our team to identify the students:

•  Examining their school notes of the previous academic year
• Questioning them to evaluate their knowledge on simple things like alphabets, simple words etc
• Asking them and their parents about their interest in going to school and pursing education.

 We have picked three kids at the end of the surveys according to the below criteria:

• kids who have been regular to school, i.e., who have shown genuine interest in education
  
• kids who are working hard and are trying to score average marks (because otherwise it will be very difficult for them to cope up in an English medium school )and
• Kids whose parents won’t migrate from this place to another – so that there is some advantage for the kid as they can be put in a public school where there exists a lot more scope for development for those kids. These kids can be adopted not only for that one year but from this time to the time they finish their education and are able to stand on their own

But then comes up the question of what is the action plan for those kids who are

       1. Quite average in their scores: For those kids who are not that regular to school and/or are not scoring well in the exams, Samvedana in association with Ashakiran will support them in improving their performance. These kids will continue studying in the government school but will get tutorship from us.

      2.Have genuine interest but lack parents support Nothing tangible except for explaining the importance of education and requesting parents to send their kids at least to the government school in addition to the tutorship from Asha Kiran could be done here.

      3. Not really interested in studying and want to support their parents financially We have requested the parents of younger kids to send them atleast to Asha Kiran so that, if the kids develop interest in studying, we can then put them in government school and from there in a public school if the kid performs well. Nothing except trying to convince the kids to not stop their education was done in the case where the kids were above 14 years of age and want to support their parents financially.

Our precious little done, we have resumed the following plan:

•   A share of the school fees was collected from the parents and the rest of the amount will be collected by Samvedana. Only then will parents realize thesignificance of the efforts the team is putting which would be ignored if we bear the entire fees.
•  The initial spending for school uniforms and shoes, admission into the school and books have been spent by Samvedana team.

Kranthi, Vinod, Dharmeet and Prateek have been regularly visiting the school and paying the fees and reporting their progress in the studies. The herculian task of meeting the parents and requesting them to pay the fees was also taken up by them.

Complete information about the background of the kids and their family, the school and the expenditures can be found here. 

• Anji
• Sirisha
• Manjusha
  

Kudos to each of the team members for their efforts! This initiative wouldn't have continued without you all..

          The kids were admitted into the school on 18th of June this year, an ordinary day which turned into one of those ‘very special’ days in our lives by the smiles of these tiny tots. We know this is just the beginning and we have a long way to go and this has definitely not transformed us from a small fish to a whale. We are still the same small fish. We are still in the seamless ocean. Just that, the ocean feels a little less evasive and a little more familiar!

 Note: We are planning on doing the same even this year. Want to participate in any possible way? Please contact us. Will be elaborating on the plan in another post pretty soon :-)

Signing off,

-Deepti